North and west, in the direction of Yellow Bird's people, went Jolly
Roger and Peter after that night. They traveled slowly and cautiously,
and with each day Peter came to understand more clearly there was some
reason why they must be constantly on their guard. His master, he
noticed, was thrillingly attentive whenever a sound came to their
ears--perhaps the cracking of a twig, a mysterious movement of brush,
or the tread of a cloven hoof. And instinctively he came to know they
were evading Man. He remembered vividly their escape from Cassidy and
their quiet hiding for many days in the mass of sun-baked rocks which
Jolly Roger had called the Stew-Kettle. The same vigilance seemed to be
a part of his master's movements now. He did not laugh, or sing, or
whistle, or talk loudly. He built fires so small that at first Peter
was absorbed in an almost scientific analysis of them; and instead of
shooting game which could have been easily secured he set little snares
in the evening, and caught fish in the streams. At night they always
slept half a mile or more from the place where they had built their
tiny supper-fire. And during these hours of sleep Peter was ready to
rouse himself at the slightest sound of movement near them. Scarcely a
night passed that his low growl of warning did not bring Jolly Roger
out of his slumber, a hand on his gun, and his eyes and ears wide open.
Whether he would have used the gun had the red-coated police suddenly
appeared, McKay had not quite assured himself. Day after day the same
old fight went on within him. He analyzed his situation from every
point of view, and always--no matter how he went about it--eventually
found himself face to face with the same definite fact. If the law
succeeded in catching Him it would not trouble itself to punish him for
stealing back the Treaty Money, or for holding up Government mails, or
for any of his other misdemeanors. It would hang him for the murder of
Jed Hawkins. And the minions of the law would laugh at the truth, even
if he told it--which he never would. More than once his imaginative
genius had drawn up a picture of that impossible happening. For it was
a truth so inconceivable that he found the absurdity of it a grimly
humorous thing. Even Nada believed he had killed her scoundrelly
foster-father. Yet it was she--herself--who had killed him! And it was
Nada whom the law would hang, if the truth was known--and believed.
Frequently he went back over the scenes of that tragic night at Cragg's
Ridge when all the happiness in the world seemed to be offering itself
to him--the night when Nada was to go with him to the Missioner's, to
become his wife, And then--the dark trail--the disheveled girl
staggering to him through the starlight, and her sobbing story of how
Jed Hawkins had tried to drag her through the forest to Mooney's cabin,
and how--at last--she had saved herself by striking him down with a
stick which she had caught up out of the darkness. Would the police
believe HIM--an outlaw--if he told the rest of the story?--how he had
gone back to give Jed Hawkins the beating of his life, and had found
him dead in the trail, where Nada had struck him down? Would they
believe him if, in a moment of cowardice, he told them that to protect
the girl he loved he had fastened the responsibility of the crime upon
himself? No, they would not. He had made the evidence too complete. The
world would call him a lying yellow-back if he betrayed what had
actually happened on the trail between Cragg's Ridge and Mooney's cabin.
And this, after all, was the one remaining bit of happiness in Jolly
Roger's heart, the knowledge that he had made the evidence utterly
complete, and that Nada would never know, and the world would never
know--the truth. His love for the blue-eyed girl-woman who had given
her heart and her soul into his keeping, even when she knew he was an
outlaw, was an undying thing, like his love for the mother of years
ago. “It will be easy to die for her,” he told Peter, and this, in the
end, was what he knew he was going to do. Thought of the inevitable did
not make him afraid. He was determined to keep his freedom and his life
as long as he could, but he was fatalistic enough, and sufficiently
acquainted with the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, to know what the
ultimate of the thing would be. And yet, with tragedy behind him, and a
still grimmer tragedy ahead, the soul of Jolly Roger was not dead or in
utter darkness. In it, waking and sleeping, he enshrined the girl who
had been willing to give up all other things in the world for him, who
had pleaded with him in the last hour of storm down on the edge of
civilization that she be given the privilege of accompanying him
wherever his fate might lead. That he was an outlaw had not destroyed
her faith in him. That he had killed a man--a man unfit to live--had
only drawn her arms more closely about him, and had made her more
completely a part of him. And a thousand times the maddening thought
possessed Jolly Roger--was he wrong, and not right, in refusing to
accept the love and companionship which she had begged him to accept,
in spite of all that had happened and all that might happen?
Day by day he slowly won for himself, and at last, as they traveled in
the direction of Yellow Bird's country, he crushed the final doubt that
oppressed him, and knew that he was right. In his selfishness he had
not shackled her to an outlaw. He had left her free. Life and hope and
other happiness were ahead of her. He had not destroyed her, and this
thought would strengthen him and leave something of gladness in his
heart, even in that gray dawn when the law would compel him to make his
final sacrifice.
It is a strange peace which follows grief, a secret happiness no other
soul but one can understand. Out of it excitement and passion have been
burned, and it is then the Great God of things comes more closely into
the possession of his own. And now, as they went westward and north
toward the Wollaston Lake country, this peace possessed Jolly Roger. It
mellowed his world. It was half an ache, half a steady and undying
pain, but it drew Life nearer to him than he had ever known it before.
His love for the sun and the sky, for the trees and flowers and all
growing things of the earth was more worship of the divine than a love
for physical things, and each day he felt it drawing more closely about
him in its comradeship, whispering to him of its might, and of its
power to care for him in the darkest hours of stress that might come.
He did not travel fast after he had reached the decision to go to
Yellow Bird's people. And he tried to imagine, a great deal of the
time, that Nada was with him. He succeeded in a way that bewildered
Peter, for quite frequently the man talked to someone who was not there.
The slowness and caution with which they traveled developed Peter's
mental faculties with marvelous swiftness. His master, free of egoism
and prejudice, had placed him on a plane of intimate equality, and
Peter struggled each day to live up a little more to the responsibility
of this intimacy and confidence. Instinct, together with human
training, taught him woodcraft until in many ways he was more clever
than his master. And along with this Jolly Roger slowly but surely
impressed upon him the difference between wanton slaughter and
necessary killing.
“Everything that's got a breath of life must kill--up to a certain
point,” Jolly Roger explained to him, repeating the lesson over and
over. “And that isn't wrong, Peter. The sin is in killing when you
don't have to. See that tree over there, with a vine as big as my wrist
winding around it, like a snake? Well, that vine is choking the life
out of the tree, and in time the tree will die. But the vine is doing
just what God A'mighty meant it to do. It needs a tree to live on. But
I'm going to cut the vine, because I think more of the tree than I do
the vine. That's MY privilege--following my conscience. And we're
eating young partridges tonight, because we had to have something to
keep us alive. It's the necessity of the thing that counts, Peter.
Think you can understand that?”
It was pretty hard for Peter at first, but he was observant, and his
mind worked quickly. The crime of destroying birdlings in their nest,
or on the ground, was impressed upon him. He began to understand there
was a certain humiliating shame attached to an attack upon a creature
weaker than himself, unless there was a reason for it. He looked
chiefly to his master for decisions in the matter. Snowshoe rabbits,
young and half grown, were very tame in this month of August, and
ordinarily he would have destroyed many of them in a day's travel. But
unless Jolly Roger gave him a signal, or he was hungry, he would pass a
snowshoe unconcernedly. This phase of Peter's development interested
Jolly Roger greatly. The outlaw's philosophy had not been punctured by
the egotistical “I am the only reasoning being” arguments of
narrow-gauged nature scientists. He believed that Peter possessed not
only a brain and super-instinct, but also a very positive reasoning
power which he was helping to develop. And the process was one that
fascinated him. When he was not sleeping, or traveling, or teaching
Peter he was usually reading the wonderful little red volumes of
history which he had purloined from the mail sledge up near the Barren
Lands. He knew their contents nearly by heart. His favorites were the
life-stories of Napoleon, Margaret of Anjou, and Peter the Great, and
always when he compared his own troubles with the difficulties and
tragedies over which these people had triumphed he felt a new courage
and inspiration, and faced the world with better cheer. If Nature was
his God and Bible, and Nada his Angel, these finger-worn little books
written by a man half a century dead were voices out of the past urging
him on to his best. Their pages were filled with the vivid lessons of
sacrifice, of courage and achievement, of loyalty, honor and
dishonor--and of the crashing tragedy which comes always with the last
supreme egoism and arrogance of man. He marked the dividing lines, and
applied them to himself. And he told Peter of his conclusions. He felt
a consuming tenderness for the glorious Margaret of Anjou, and his
heart thrilled one day when a voice seemed to whisper to him out of the
printed page that Nada was another Margaret--only more wonderful
because she was not a princess and a queen.
“The only difference,” he explained to Peter, “is that Margaret
sacrificed and fought and died for a king, and our Nada is willing to
do all that for a poor beggar of an outlaw. Which makes Margaret a
second-rater compared with Nada,” he added. “For Margaret wanted a
kingdom along with her husband, and Nada would take--just you and me.
And that's where we're pulling some Peter the Great stuff,” he tried to
laugh. “We won't let her do it!”
And so they went on, day after day, toward the Wollaston waterways--the
country of Yellow Bird and her people.
It was early September when they crossed the Geikie and struck up the
western shore of Wollaston Lake. The first golden tints were ripening
in the canoe-birch leaves, and the tremulous whisper of autumn was in
the rustle of the aspen trees. The poplars were yellowing, the ash were
blood red with fruit, and in cool, dank thickets wild currants were
glossy black and lusciously ripe. It was the season which Jolly Roger
loved most of all, and it was the beginning of Peter's first September.
The days were still hot, but at night there was a bracing something in
the air that stirred the blood, and Peter found a sharp, new note in
the voices of the wild. The wolf howled again in the middle of the
night. The loon forgot his love-sickness, and screamed raucous defiance
at the moon. The big snowshoes were no longer tame, but wary and alert,
and the owls seemed to slink deeper into darkness and watch with more
cunning. And Jolly Roger knew the human masters of the wilderness were
returning from the Posts to their cabins and trap-lines, and he
advanced with still greater caution. And as he went, watching for smoke
and listening for sound, he began to reflect upon the many changes
which five years might have produced among Yellow Bird's people.
Possibly other misfortunes had come, other winters of hunger and
pestilence, scattering and destroying the tribe. It might even be that
Yellow Bird was dead.
For three days he followed slowly the ragged shore of Wollaston Lake,
and foreboding of evil was oppressing him when he came upon the
fish-racks of the Indians. They had been abandoned for many days, for
black bear tracks fairly inundated the place, and Peter saw two of the
bears--fat and unafraid--nosing along the shore where the fish offal
had been thrown.
It was the next day, in the hour before sunset, that Jolly Roger and
Peter came out on the edge of a shelving beach where Indian children
were playing in the white sand. Among these children, playing and
laughing with them, was a woman. She was tall and slim, with a skirt of
soft buckskin that came only a little below her knees, and two shining
black braids which tossed like velvety ropes when she ran. And she was
running when they first saw her--running away from them, pursued by the
children; and then she twisted suddenly, and came toward them, until
with a startled cry she stopped almost within the reach of Jolly
Roger's hands. Peter was watching. He saw the half frightened look in
her face, then the slow widening of her dark eyes, and the quick intake
of her breath. And in that moment Jolly Roger cried out a name.
“Yellow Bird!”
He went to her slowly, wondering if it could be possible the years had
touched Yellow Bird so lightly; and Yellow Bird reached out her hands
to him, her face flaming up with sudden happiness, and Peter wondered
what it was all about as he cautiously eyed the half dozen brown-faced
little Indian children who had now gathered quietly about them. In
another moment there was an interruption. A girl came through the
fringe of willows behind them. It was as if another Yellow Bird had
come to puzzle Peter--the same slim, graceful little body, the same
shining eyes, and yet she was half a dozen years younger than Nada. For
the first time Peter was looking at Sun Cloud, the daughter of Yellow
Bird. And in that moment he loved her, just as something gave him
confidence and faith in the starry-eyed woman whose hands were in his
master's. Then Yellow Bird called, and the girl went to her mother, and
Jolly Roger hugged her in his arms and kissed her on the scarlet mouth
she turned up to him. Then they hurried along the shore toward the
fishing camp, the children racing ahead to tell the news, led by Sun
Cloud--with Peter running at her heels.
[Illustration: They hurred to the camp, the children racing ahead to
tell the news]
Never had Peter heard anything from a man's throat like the two yells
that came from Slim Buck, Yellow Bird's husband and chief of the tribe,
after he had greeted Jolly Roger McKay. It was a note harking back to
the old war trails of the Crees, and what followed it that night was
most exciting to Peter. Big fires were built of white driftwood, and
there was singing and dancing, and a great deal of laughter and eating,
and the interminable howling of half a hundred Siwash dogs. Peter did
not like the dogs, but he did no fighting because his love for Sun
Cloud kept him close to the touch of her little brown hand.
That night, in the glow of the big fire outside of Slim Buck's tepee,
Jolly Roger's heart thrilled with a pleasure which it had not known for
a long time. He loved to look at Yellow Bird. Five years had not
changed her. Her eyes were starry bright. Her teeth were like milk. The
color still came and went in her brown cheeks, even as it did in Sun
Cloud's. All of which, in this heart of a wilderness, meant that she
had been happy and prosperous. And he also loved to look at Sun Cloud,
who possessed all of that rare wildflower beauty sometimes given to the
northern Crees. And it did him good to look at Slim Buck. He was a
splendid mate, and a royal father, and Jolly Roger found himself
strangely happy in their happiness. In the eyes of men and women and
little children he saw that happiness all about him. For three winters
there had been splendid trapping, Slim Buck told him, and this season
they had caught and dried enough fish to carry them through the
following winter, even if black days should come. His people were rich.
They had many warm blankets, and good clothes, and the best of tepees
and guns and sledges, and several treasures besides. Two of these
Yellow Bird and her husband disclosed to Jolly Roger this first night.
One of them was a sewing machine, and the other--a phonograph! And
Jolly Roger listened to “Mother Machree” and “The Rosary” that night as
he sat by Wollaston Lake with six hundred miles of wilderness between
him and Cragg's Ridge.
Later, when the camp slept, Yellow Bird and Slim Buck and Jolly Roger
still sat beside the red embers of their fire, and Jolly Roger told of
what had happened down at the edge of civilization. It was what his
heart needed, and he left out none of the details. Slim Buck was
listening, but Jolly Roger knew he was talking straight at Yellow Bird,
and that her warm heart was full of understanding. Softly, in that low
Cree voice which is the sweetest of all voices, she asked him many
questions about Nada, and gently her slim fingers caressed the tress of
Nada's hair which he let her take in her hands. And after a long time,
she said.
“I have given her a name. She is Oo-Mee, the Pigeon.”
Slim Buck started at the strange note in her voice.
“The Pigeon,” he repeated,
“Yes, Oo-Mee, the Pigeon,” Yellow Bird nodded. She was not looking at
them. In the firelight her eyes were glowing pools. Her body had grown
a little tense. Without asking Jolly Roger's permission she placed the
tress of Nada's hair in her bosom. “Oo-Mee, the Pigeon,” she said
again, looking far away. “That is her name, because the Pigeon flies
fast and straight and true. Over forests and lakes and worlds the
Pigeon flies. It is tireless. It is swift. It always--flies home.”
Slim Buck rose quietly to his feet.
“Come,” he whispered, looking at Jolly Roger,
Yellow Bird did not look at them or speak to them, and Slim Buck--with
his hand on Jolly Roger's arm--pulled him gently away. In his eyes was
a little something of fear, and yet along with it a sublime faith.
“Her spirit will be with Oo-Mee, the Pigeon, tonight,” he said in a
voice struck with awe. “It will go to this place which you have
described, and it will live in the body of the girl, and through Yellow
Bird it will tell you tomorrow what has happened, and what is going to
happen.”
In the edge of the shore-willows Jolly Roger stood for a time watching
Yellow Bird as she sat under the stars, motionless as a figure graven
out of stone. He felt a curious tingling at his heart, something
stirring uneasily in his breast, and he stood alone even after Slim
Buck had stretched himself out in the soft sand to sleep. He was not
superstitious. Yet it was equally a part of his philosophy and his
creed to believe in the overwhelming power of the mind. “If you have
faith enough, and think hard enough, you can think anything until it
comes true,” he had told himself more than once. And he knew Yellow
Bird possessed that illimitable faith, and that behind her divination
lay generations and centuries of an unbreakable certainty in the power
of mind over matter. He realized his own limitations, but a mysterious
voice in the still night seemed whispering to him that in the crude
wisdom of Yellow Bird's brain lay the secret to strange achievement,
and that on this night her mind might perform for him what he, in his
greater wisdom, would call a miracle. He had seen things like that
happen. And he sat down in the sand, sleepless, and with Peter at his
feet waited for Yellow Bird to stir.
He could see the dull shimmer of starlight in her hair, but the rest of
her was a shadow that gave no sign of life. The camp was asleep. Even
the dogs were buried in their wallows of sand, and the last red spark
of the fires had died out. The hour passed, and another hour followed,
and the lids of Jolly Roger's eyes grew heavier as the fading stars
seemed to be sinking deeper into infinity. At last he slept, with his
back leaning against a sand-dune the children had made. He dreamed, and
was flying through the air with Yellow Bird. She was traveling swift
and straight, like an arrow, and he had difficulty in keeping up with
her, and at last he cried out for her to wait--that he could go no
farther. The cry roused him. He opened his eyes, and found cool, gray
dawn in the sky. Peter, alert, was muzzling his hand. Slim Buck lay in
the sand, still asleep. There was no stir in the camp. And then, with a
sudden catch in his breath, he looked toward Yellow Bird's tepee.
Yellow Bird still sat in the sand. Through the hours of fading
starlight and coming dawn she had not moved. Slowly McKay rose to his
feet. When he came to her, making no sound, she looked up. The shimmer
of glistening dew was in her hair. Her long lashes were wet with it.
Her face was very pale, and her eyes so large and dark that for a
moment they startled him. She was tired. Exhaustion was in her slim,
limp body.
A sigh came from her lips, and her shoulders swayed a little.
“Sit down, Neekewa,” she whispered, drawing the ropes of her hair about
her as if she were cold.
Then she drew a slim hand over her eyes, and shivered.
“It is well, Neekewa,” she spoke softly. “I have gone through the
clouds to where lives Oo-Mee, the Pigeon. I found her crying in a
trail. I whispered to her and happiness came, and that happiness is
going to live--for Neekewa and The Pigeon. It cannot die. It cannot be
killed. The Red Coated men of the Great White Father will never destroy
it. You will live. She will live. You will meet again--in happiness.
And happiness will follow ever after. That much I learned, Neekewa. In
happiness--you will meet again.”
“Where? When?” whispered Jolly Roger, his heart beating with sudden
swiftness.
Again Yellow Bird passed her hand over her eyes, and as she held it
there for a moment she bowed her head until Jolly Roger could see only
her dew-wet hair and she said,
“In the Country Beyond, Neekewa.”
Her eyes were looking at him again, big, dark and filled with mystery.
“And where is this country, Yellow Bird?” he asked, a strange chill
driving the warmth out of his heart. “You mean--up there?” And he
pointed to the gray sky above them.
“No, it is happiness to come in life, not in death,” said Yellow Bird
slowly. “It is not beyond the stars. It is--”
He waited, leaning toward her.
“In the Country Beyond,” she repeated with a tired little droop of her
head. “And where that is I do not know, Neekewa. I could not pass
beyond the great white cloud that shut me out. But it is--somewhere, I
will find it. And then I will tell you--and The Pigeon.”
She stood up, and swayed in the gray light, like one worn out by hard
travel. Then she passed into the tepee, and Jolly Roger heard her fall
on her blanket-bed.
And still stranger whisperings filled his heart as he faced the east,
where the first red blush of day drove back the star-mists of dawn. He
heard a step in the soft sand, and Slim Buck stood beside him. And he
asked.
“Did you ever hear of the Country Beyond?” Slim Buck shook his head,
and both looked in silence toward the rising sun.
Peter was glad when the camp roused itself out of sleep with waking
voices, and laughter, and the building of fires. He waited eagerly for
Sun Cloud. At last she came out of Yellow Bird's tepee, rubbing her
eyes in the face of the glow in the east, and then her white teeth
flashed a smile of welcome at him. Together they ran down to the edge
of the lake, and Peter wagged his tail while Sun Cloud went out
knee-deep and scrubbed her pretty face with handfuls of the cool water.
It was a happy day for him. He was different from the Indian dogs, and
Sun Cloud and her playmates made much of him. But never, even in their
most exciting play, did he entirely lose track of his master.
Jolly Roger, to an extent, forgot Peter. He tried to deaden within him
the impulses which Yellow Bird's conjuring had roused. He tried to see
in them a menace and a danger, and he repeated to himself the folly of
placing credence in Yellow Bird's “medicine.” But his efforts were
futile, and he was honest enough to admit it. The uneasiness was in his
breast. A new hope was rising up. And with that hope were fear and
suspense, for deep in him was growing stronger the conviction that what
Yellow Bird would tell him would be true. He noted the calm and
dignified stiffness with which Slim Buck greeted the day. The young
chief passed quietly among his people. A word traveled in whispers,
voices and footsteps were muffled and before the sun was an hour high
there was no tepee standing but one on that white strip of beach. And
the one tepee was Yellow Bird's.
Not until the camp was gone, leaving her alone, did Yellow Bird come
out into the day. She saw the food placed at her tepee door. She saw
the empty places where the homes of her people had stood, and in the
wet sand of the beach the marks of their missing canoes. Then she
turned her pale face and tired eyes to the sun, and unbraided her hair
so that it streamed glistening all about her and covered the white sand
when she sat down again in front of the smoke-darkened canvas that had
become her conjurer's house.
Two miles up the beach Slim Buck's people made another camp. But Slim
Buck and Jolly Roger remained in the cover of a wooded headland only
half a mile from Yellow Bird. They saw her when she came out. They
watched for an hour after she sat down in the sand. And then Slim Buck
grunted, and with a gesture of his hands said they would go. Jolly
Roger protested. It was not safe for Yellow Bird to remain entirely
beyond their protection. There were bears prowling about. And human
beasts occasionally found their way through the wilderness. But Slim
Buck's face was like a bronze carving in its faith and pride.
“Yellow Bird only goes with the good spirits,” he assured Jolly Roger.
“She does not do witchcraft with the bad. And no harm can come while
the good spirits are with her. It is thus she has brought us happiness
and prosperity since the days of the famine, Neekewa!”
He spoke these words in Cree, and McKay answered him in Cree as they
turned in the direction of the camp. Half way, Sun Cloud came to meet
them, with Peter at her side. She put a brown little hand in Jolly
Roger's. It was quite new and pleasant to be kissed as Jolly Roger had
kissed her, and she held up her mouth to him again. Then she ran ahead,
with Peter yipping foolishly and happily at her moccasined heels.
And Jolly Roger said,
“I wish I was your brother, Slim Buck, and Nada was Yellow Bird's
sister--and that I had many like her,” and his eyes followed Sun Cloud
with hungry yearning.
And as he said these words, Yellow Bird sat with bowed head and closed
eyes, with the soft tress of Nada's hair in her hands. It was the
physical union between them, and all that day, and the night that
followed, Yellow Bird held it in her hand or against her breast as she
struggled to send out the soul that was in her on its mission to Oo-Mee
the Pigeon. In darkness she buried the food that was left her, and
stamped on it with her feet. The sacrifice of her body had begun, and
for two days thereafter Jolly Roger and Slim Buck saw no movement of
life about the lone tepee in the sand.
But the third morning they saw the smoke of a little greenwood fire
rising straight up from in front of it.
Slim Buck drew in a deep breath. It was the signal fire.
“She knows,” he said, pointing for Jolly Roger to go. “She is calling
you!”
The tenseness was gone from the bronze muscles of his face. He was
lonely without Yellow Bird, and the signal fire meant she would be with
him again soon. Jolly Roger walked swiftly over the white beach. Again
he tried to tell himself what folly it all was, and that he was
answering the signal-fire only to humor Yellow Bird and Slim Buck. But
words, even spoken half aloud, did not quiet the eager beating of his
heart.
Not until he was very near did Yellow Bird come out of the tepee. And
it was then Jolly Roger stopped short, a gasp on his lips. She was
changed. Her radiant hair was still down, polished smooth; but her face
was whiter than he had ever seen it, and drawn and pinched almost as in
the days of the famine. For two days and two nights she had taken no
food, and for two days and two nights she had not slept. But there was
triumph in her big, wide-open eyes, and Jolly Roger felt something
strange rising up in his breast.
Yellow Bird held out her hands toward him.
“We have been together, The Pigeon and I,” she said. “We have slept in
each other's arms, and the warmth of her head has lain against my
breast. I have learned the secrets, Neekewa--all but one. The spirits
will not tell me where lies the Country Beyond. But it is not up
there--beyond the stars. It is not in death, but in life you will find
it. That they have told me. And you must not go back to where The
Pigeon lives, for you will find black desolation there--but always you
must keep on and on, seeking for the Country Beyond. You will find it.
And there also you will find The Pigeon--and happiness. You cannot
fail, Neekewa, yet my heart stings me that I cannot tell you where that
strange country is. But when I came to it gold and silver clouds shut
it in, and I could see nothing, and yet out of it came the singing of
birds and the promise of sweet voices that it shall be found--if you
seek faithfully, Neekewa. I am glad.”
Each word that she spoke in her soft and tremulous Cree was a new
message of hope in the empty heart of Jolly Roger McKay. The world
might laugh. Men might tap their heads and smile. His own voice might
argue and taunt. But deep in his heart he believed.
Something of the radiance of the new day came into his face, even as it
was returning into Yellow Bird's. He looked about him--east, west,
north and south--upon the sunlit glory of water and earth, and suddenly
he reached out his arms.
“I'll find it, Yellow Bird,” he cried. “I'll find this place you call
the Country Beyond! And when I do--”
He turned and took one of Yellow Bird's slim hands in both his own.
“And when I do, we'll come back to you, Yellow Bird,” he said.
And like a cavalier of old he touched his lips gently to the palm of
Yellow Bird's little brown hand.